shrine, where a bright being lived a life of high and
lofty intellectual emotion. But he never succeeded in exchanging a
word with the object of his admiration, except on a certain day, marked
in his calendar long after with letters of gold. There was a regatta
in the neighbourhood of the school, to which the boys were allowed to
go under certain conditions. He had gone, and had spent his day in
wandering about alone, until the glare and the crowd had brought on a
headache; and he had resolved to return home by an early train. He
went to the station, hoping that he might be unobserved, and stepped
into an empty carriage. Just as the train started, he heard rapid
steps; the door was flung open, and his hero entered. Seeing a junior
boy of his own house in the carriage, he made some good-natured remark,
and before Hugh could realise the greatness of his good fortune, his
hero had sate down beside him, and after a few words, with a friendly
impulse, had launched into a ghost story which lasted the whole of the
journey, and the very phrases of which haunted Hugh's mind for weeks.
They had walked down from the station together, but alas for the
vicissitudes of human affairs, his god, contented with having shown
courteous kindness to a lonely and uninteresting small boy, never gave
him for the rest of the school term, after which he left, the slightest
sign of recognition; and yet for years after the fields and trees and
houses which they had passed on the line were suffused for Hugh with a
subtle emotion in the memory of that journey.

And then, a little later than this, Hugh had the first and perhaps the
most abiding joy of his life. A clever, ambitious, active boy of his
own standing, whom he had long secretly admired, took a pronounced
fancy to him. He was a boy, Hugh saw afterwards, with a deeply jealous
disposition; and the first attraction of Hugh's friendship had been the
fact that Hugh threatened his supremacy in no department whatever.
Hugh was the only boy of the set who had never done better than he in
anything. But then there came in a more generous feeling. Hugh's
heart awoke; there was nothing which it was not a pleasure to do for
his friend. He would put anything aside, at any moment, to walk, to
talk, to discharge little businesses, to fetch and carry, to be in
attendance. Moreover, Hugh found his tongue, but his anxiety to retain
his friend's affection made him astonishingly tactful and discreet.